You know what Chekhov used to say about the gun? If it shows up in one act, it’ll go off in the next? The same holds true for the any and all vintage horror riffs that materialize during “Frankenweenie,” a ruff retelling of the Frankenstein saga that packs on the creep while it unloads the charm. So pay attention to that opening homage to Godzilla. It may rear its scaly head before long, and it might have some help from a spooky Japanese grade-schooler.

This is all in a night’s work for director Tim Burton, who once again realizes his ghoulishly beautiful worldview in this 3D mash note to fright-film nostalgia. It is pure, retro-cinematic joy: in its glorious monochrome; in its tips of the hat to classic villains, from Frankenstein and Dracula to the Burgermeister Meisterburger of “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town”; and in its gloom-and-doomy gothic art design and stop motion puppetry, which return us to the spindle-legged animated Burton-verse of “The Nightmare Before Christmas” and “Corpse Bride.”

The overall effect is great cinema, good fun, a visual feast for pie-eyed Burton fans — and, I must add, a terrifically warped reminder of just how freaky a PG film can be. Parents be warned: Any child who’s easily spooked at the movies should stay wide of this one, as it ventures into some pretty dark territory pretty darned quickly. As someone observes near the climax: “Reanimating a corpse! It’s very. . . upsetting!”

The corpse being re-animated is a dog — a cute little feller named Sparky who gets smushed by a car, then put to rest, then exhumed, then patched up and strapped to a table by his grieving owner. That’s Victor (voiced by Charlie Tahan), a strange, pale boy whose strangeness and paleness resemble blushing normalcy next to all the other anemic weirdos at New Holland Elementary School. There a brilliant science teacher with a Slavic accent (Martin Landau) delivers the most illuminating disquisition on electrical storms I’ve ever witnessed.

From this lecture Victor gleans the raw facts necessary to bring back Sparky. And back he comes, though he draws flies, loses body parts and leaks on occasion. Where the plot goes from there is easy enough to guess if you’ve read Mary Shelley, watched any Universal horror classics or seen any of the movie’s many other referents (Hammer Films gets a decent cameo). So you won’t be surprised when a hunchbacked boy gets into mischief with a kid who looks and lisps like Boris Karloff (Martin Short).

Some of the madness is all Burton’s: the cat who craps prophesies, for instance. (If I missed some obvious film-buff allusion in that one, please email me.) And “Frankenweenie” is, in fact, a remake and expansion of his own live-action black-and-white 1984 short, which featured essentially the same plot — and unquestionably the same Burtonesque knack for mashing the morbid with the sweet.